Reproduction and Its Discontents in Mexico: Childbirth and Contraception from 1750 to 1905 by Nora E. Jaffary (review)

In Reproduction and Its Discontents in Mexico, Nora E. Jaffary tackles the topic of reproduction and its regulation in Mexico City and the southern state of Oaxaca, from the mid-eighteenth to the end of the nineteenth century. One of the primary arguments of the book is that between 1750 and 1905 the sexual and reproductive practices of a wide sector of Mexico's female population were increasingly scrutinized by society, as sexual honour and public virtue were associated with the independent nation.

The book is divided into six chapters: virginity, pregnancy and contraception, abortion, infanticide, monstrous births, and obstetrics. Its subtitle emphasizes the concepts of childbirth and contraception because they were central to the project of nation building in Mexico and elsewhere. In all cases, Jaffary addresses the legal, medical, and cultural aspects that are the reason behind continuity and change.

Distinguishing between "biological" virginity (presence of the hymen) and "social" virginity (related to factors such as class, Christianity, and honor), in chapter one Jaffary states that though virginity was always socially constructed, some ideas about it underwent transformation throughout the period. Although in the colonial era it had sacred connotations and elite women were the ones that usually needed to establish the public record of their virginity to secure racial and social legitimacy, over the course of the nineteenth century, medical and criminal concerns with virginal status became more prevalent. Many more Mexican women came under scrutiny in terms of the preservation of their virginity as a way of safeguarding the purity of the entire nation.

In chapter two, the author examines conception and pregnancy, showing that ideas and practices surrounding them were the most stable during the period. However, one significant difference that women experienced when professionalization of obstetrics began was the introduction of internal obstetrical examinations. There was also an increasing scrutiny of Mexican women's reproductive anatomy, which led to the discovery of their supposedly narrow pelvis.

Perhaps the most original chapters in the book are chapters three and four, in which Jaffary studies women's attempts to regulate childbirth through either contraception or abortion, or by means of infanticide. Analyzing abortion and infanticide cases brought to the Inquisition and later to civil justice, Nora E. Jaffary shows that while Mexico experienced some liberalization in the judicial treatment of these crimes beginning with the 1871 Penal Code, individual denunciations to local authorities by family or community members increased. Jaffary considers that this might have occurred because, towards the end of the century, Mexicans were shifting their expectations about the gendered behaviour they considered socially acceptable. These chapters also reveal that judges did not tend to prosecute women for these offences. The book includes appendices on cases of abortion and infanticide that the author has been able to track down and mentions dates, names of the accused, outcome, and references.

In chapter five, Jaffary looks into so-called monstrous births, and finds that, by the late nineteenth century, physicians turned their focus directly onto (and into) the bodies of the women who had given birth to such creatures and considered these anomalous births as aberrations of Mexican women's reproductive anatomy.

In the last chapter, she analyzes obstetrics, gynecology, and birth itself. Although midwives continued to deliver the majority of children in Mexico during this period, Jaffary finds that there were significant changes to the ways in which women experienced childbirth; for instance, the use of forceps increased, as did other surgical interventions.

In all, the monograph lays claim to study the period from 1775 (the year the Spanish Royal Protomedicato called for the licensing of midwifery) to 1905 (when the first Mexican maternity hospital was closed). Throughout, however, Jaffary mentions cases from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as Pre-Hispanic times, in order to prove her thesis about continuity in Mexican reproductive health traditions.

One of...